What Comes After the Gay-Rights Victory?

In 1974, shortly after Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision United States, a Christian humanitarian organization based outside Seattle, converted to Christianity, he got engaged. When his fiancée suggested that they set up a registry for wedding gifts at a department store, he told her, “As long as there are children starving in the world, we’re not going to own fine china, crystal, or silver.”

At the time, Stearns was in the middle of an M.B.A. program at the Wharton School. In what he would later characterize as a demonstration of “God’s sense of irony,” he became a vice-president at the Franklin Mint, known for its collectible coins and jewelry, and then the C.E.O. of Lenox, America’s largest manufacturer of fine china, before finally abandoning his corporate career, in 1998, to join World Vision.

World Vision United States is the tenth-largest charity in the country, with an annual budget of $982 million. Its parent organization, World Vision International, has more than forty-four thousand staff members, who work in more than a hundred countries on disaster relief, water and food security, education, and health care. World Vision is an ecumenical organization, and employs Christians from more than fifty denominations; the American office requires that all employees confess the Apostles’ Creed or adhere to the organization’s official Statement of Faith. Accordingly, employees are expected to practice “abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage.”

But, last Monday, World Vision announced a change in the interpretation of that rule: the requirement of fidelity would now be extended to include same-sex marriages. In a letter announcing the decision, Stearns wrote that World Vision’s board of directors had “spent several years praying about and discussing this issue.” The board, he said, considered the debates over other divisive matters—including “divorce and remarriage, views on evolution, the role of women in church leadership, and whether birth control is acceptable”—and hoped that, just as the various Christian denominations had worked together, despite their differences, to serve the poor, they could work through this as well.

“I want to be clear that we have not endorsed same-sex marriage,” Stearns added. But, as his letter made equally clear, many of the mainline denominations from which World Vision draws its employees and its donations have changed their positions to permit same-sex marriage. The decision, however, put the organization at odds with its more conservative partners, and, almost immediately, many donors announced that they would cease their support. Leaders from the Southern Baptist Convention, the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, and other evangelical churches called for boycotts.

An effort to avoid the battle over human sexuality had instead put World Vision on its front line. Last Wednesday, only two days after announcing the new policy, the organization reversed its decision. In a second letter, Stearns told World Vision’s “trusted partners and Christian leaders” that board members had “listened to you and want to say thank you and to humbly ask your forgiveness.” He reiterated that the organization “stands firmly on the biblical view of marriage,” while reminding his audience that “all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, are created by God and are to be loved and treated with dignity and respect.”

On Monday, conservatives demanded to know how World Vision could hold the first of these views and still hire married gay employees; on Wednesday, liberals began to ask how it could hold the second view and still deny employment to gays and lesbians. Two days might have been a record time in which to alienate both sides of the same-sex-marriage debate, but World Vision quickly learned that there may be no such thing as neutral ground in the question of sexuality. In a conference call this Thursday, Stearns said that ten thousand children had lost their sponsors since last Monday.

As Stearns wrote in his first letter, the debate over human sexuality “has torn apart whole denominations, individual congregations, Christian colleges, and even individual Christian families.” But the conflict has not been confined to religious organizations. On the same day that World Vision announced its new policy on same-sex marriage, the open-source-software company Mozilla announced the appointment of a new C.E.O., Brendan Eich, who immediately came under fire for his earlier financial support of Proposition 8, California’s gay-marriage ban. Employees and developers loudly voiced their objection to Eich’s promotion, and on Thursday he announced his resignation.

The simultaneous protests are notable because they involve two very different organizations, whose successes have depended, in large part, on the public credibility of their commitment to a cause. Both organizations, as a result, faced moral rather than legal tests. Unlike in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the religious-objection case argued before the Supreme Court last week, the right of World Vision to hire and fire its employees for religious reasons is uncontested. And Mozilla had no legal grounds to terminate Eich’s employment on the basis of his political donations. The two controversies, together, indicate a boundary beyond which judicial rulings and legislative acts cannot resolve disputes—where we have to live with the disagreeable opinions of fellow citizens.

Even as polls find that approval for gay rights is ticking steadily upward, as state after state recognizes marriage equality, statistics do not capture the sharpness of the fractures that still separate its advocates from its opponents. While one might expect gay rights to have become less divisive as they have become more widely accepted, that has not quite been the case—perhaps because the shift in public opinion has been so swift. The minority that remains opposed to same-sex marriage and other gay-rights issues has grown more vocal in its opposition; the question for the new majority has become how to address, or accommodate, such opposition.

With same-sex marriage on its way to wide legal acceptance, some of the conflict has migrated to the domain of employment law. Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, argued for the winning side in a Supreme Court case two years ago that defined the so-called ministerial exception. “World Vision is an unusual organization in a lot of ways, with their affirmation of faith, but they’re legally entitled to do that. If you’re a religious organization, you can hire members of your religious faith exclusively,” Laycock told me.

“Whether anything can limit those rights to use religious preferences in hiring is a huge political debate in Washington,” Laycock added. While there were suggestions that World Vision’s initial decision to accommodate gay employees might have been influenced by political pressure—the organization received $179 million in government grants last year alone—Laycock was skeptical. “There’ve been cases over the years in the lower courts that try to allege accepting federal moneys negates the right to hire on the basis of religion,” he said. “But, as best I can tell, these organizations receive money for general operations, not specific staff positions. Those cases don’t go far.”

These religious exemptions, Laycock explained, were first included in the welfare-reform law signed by Bill Clinton in 1996; they were expanded, through an executive order, under George W. Bush, and have been maintained by Barack Obama, despite a promise, during his campaign, to curtail them. So, while it is unlikely that money motivated World Vision’s initial decision, last Monday, to hire married gays and lesbians, its swift reversal was almost certainly motivated by the withdrawal of funds from conservative supporters. A similar protest, from the other side, led Eich to quickly resign his position as C.E.O. of Mozilla.

It seems that there can be no neutral position on gay rights for individuals or institutions. One side appears to demand the exclusion of gays and lesbians; the other side wishes to condemn those who would endorse that exclusion. Both sides are willing to go beyond advocating for legislative or judicial measures, and apply pressure in the form of economic boycotts.

For the new moral majority in support of gay rights, there is an unexpected challenge: to live with dissent while continuing to advance the cause of equality. This challenge is, at least in part, the result of a hard-won victory, many years in the making, and the speed of its advances in the past few years. In his last book, Martin Luther King, Jr., warned of the uncharted terrain for a movement that had succeeded in part through judicial victories. “So far, we have had constitutional backing for most of our demands for change, and this has made our work easier, since we could be sure of legal support from the federal courts,” King observed. “Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear.”

“We are faced with the fact that tomorrow is today,” King continued. “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Tomorrow came more quickly for gay rights than anyone could have imagined, but the controversies at World Vision and Mozilla suggest that neither the old majority nor the new one has discerned how to confront the fierceness of that urgency.